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NETGEAR today announced the availability of the Open Source Wireless-G Router (WGR614L; $69)--welcome news to the open source community.

Works with Windows Vista-certified, the WGR614L features a 240 MHz MIPS32 CPU core with 16 KB of instruction cache, 16 KB of data cache, 1 KB of pre-fetch cache, and incorporates 4 MB of flash memory and 16 MB of RAM. In addition to an external 2 dBi antenna, the WGR614L integrates a second internal diversity antenna to increase performance and range. The Wi-Fi router supports free open source Linux-based Tomato and DD-WRT firmware and will soon support OpenWRT.

The launch of the WGR614L is significant to the open source community as there has been a growing demand for more powerful platforms to support a rapidly growing segment of open source enthusiasts that are seeking to create more robust, commercial-grade applications for their wireless routers, said Som Pal Choudhury, senior product line manager for advanced wireless at NETGEAR in a press release today.

In addition to adding a more powerful processor and additional memory to the proven Broadcom platform, the most popular open source firmware, Tomato and DD-WRT, are available on WGR614L making it easier for users to develop a wide variety of applications. An important feature of our offering is the dedicated and responsive open source community, which enables users to easily exchange ideas and troubleshoot issues. New applications currently being developed by this community include traffic shaping applications, redirections to captive portals for hotspots, guest access via a separate SSID, upstream and downstream QOS, and intelligent bandwidth monitoring.

The NETGEAR Open Source Wireless-G Router is backed by a one-year hardware warranty and is available now online and at some brick-and-mortar stores. For firmware downloads, forums, blogs, articles, source code, user guides, and tech support for the WGR614L, users can visit www.myopenrouter.com.